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Why Functional Medicine Stops Working for IBS · The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Functional medicine was supposed to fix your IBS and chronic diarrhea, and it didn't.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna tell you why and what to do about it.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so first, getting advanced testing at all, that was the right move.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Most women never even make it that far, and you did.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what happens constantly: a woman comes to me, she's already got a stool test in hand from somewhere else, naturopath, wellness coach, nutritionist, some functional medicine place.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I look at the actual report, and half the time I'm like, this barely tells you anything.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, think about it like blood work.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: If your doctor only checks a few things when there's actually 20 things that actually matter, you walk out thinking you got the whole picture.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: You got a tiny slice of the picture and a clean report.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's happening with a lot of these panels.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: They'll show you two or three strains of bacteria when there's dozens that actually matter.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Half of them don't look at short chain fatty acids, which that's huge.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the most important things on the whole test.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it comes back looking basically fine and everybody just moves on.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the actual problem never even got looked at.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And even when the test itself is decent, the person reading it has to actually know what they're looking at.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, a lot of them don't.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've had women bring me results from another practitioner, and the supplements they were told to take didn't really match what was going on in the report.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like the data was sitting right there and nobody used it.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a good example of how this plays out.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody gets told they have bile acid malabsorption.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Doctor gives it a name, gives them a medication for it.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: She walks away thinking, okay, finally I have my answer.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's not an answer, that's a symptom.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Your body doesn't just randomly stop absorbing bile acids for no reason.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Something else is causing that.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if nobody ever asks what that something is, you're not treating a cause.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: You're just managing a side effect of a problem that's still sitting there doing whatever it wants.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if you tested and you're still stuck, the first question is not, does testing work?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's did your test actually look deep enough?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And did the person reading it know what to do with what they found?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say the testing you had done was really good.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say the protocol built off of it was the right one.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's still two more ways that this falls apart.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: The first one, what happens in the middle when things get harder before they get better?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: When you start clearing out bad bacteria or yeast, sometimes your body reacts before it improves.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Bloating gets worse, symptoms flare for a bit.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's normal and that's actually part of it working.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: If nobody's checking in with you when that happens, you panic.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You think the supplements are making me worse, so you stop.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then the whole protocol gets blamed for failing when really what happened is you just quit right when it was starting to work, and nobody was there to tell you that.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I see this one all the time.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Someone gets a solid protocol, hits a rough patch two or three weeks in, they don't hear from anybody, they assume it's broken, and they walk away.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then she tells everybody functional medicine didn't work for me.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: What actually happened is she needed a small tweak and a phone call and she didn't get either of those.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing, the one almost nobody touches at all, and that's the nervous system.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what's going on in the body of a woman who's had urgent diarrhea for years.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Every time she doesn't make it to the bathroom in time, every time she leaves dinner early, every time she's mapping out bathrooms before she even agrees to go somewhere, her nervous system is logging every single one of those.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not as annoying, but as dangerous.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Your body's basically got two settings fight or flight.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's survival mode, and rest and digest.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the mode you actually need to heal in.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Years of bracing for the next accident, and your body just gets stuck on the first one.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in survival mode, healing is not the priority.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Rebuilding your gut lining, repopulating bacteria, fixing motility, none of that gets resources while your body thinks it's under attack.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that connects to something else.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Your gut isn't just digesting food, it's where most of your neurotransmitters actually get made.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when the gut's been inflamed and broken for years, you're not just stuck on high alert.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the time you don't even have enough of what you need to calm yourself back down.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the women I work with have major anxiety, panic, and it's not just because having an accident in public is terrifying, although it is, it's because their gut literally stopped making what their brain needs to feel calm in the first place.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So now you've got a body that's scared and it's also lost some of its own ability to come down off of being scared.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Your lab test isn't going to show you that.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Your supplement protocols are not going to fix that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And until somebody actually deals with it directly, the rest of the healing just keeps stalling, no matter how good everything else is.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Ask yourself these.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Did you do real testing, get real results, follow a real protocol, and either not improve or improve for a bit and then just stall out?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: When something stressful happens, even something small, does your gut react right away, even when nothing about your food or your supplements changed?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Did you start a protocol, hit a rough week, and just stop without ever getting it adjusted?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: If any of that sounds like you, it's one of these.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: How deep your testing actually went, whether the person reading it knew what they were looking at, whether anyone was there when things got hard, or whether the nervous system was ever touched at all.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those are completely different problems than a parasite that didn't clear.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it needs a completely different fix.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: If this sounds like your exact situation, you don't have to keep guessing.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: There's a link below where you can book a call with my team.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Bring everything you've already tried.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: We'll go through it and tell you straight whether the gap was your testing, your protocol, or something nobody touched at all.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Out of everything I just walked through, here's the one you can actually do something about tonight on your own without retesting anything or hiring anyone.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: The testing depth and the protocol design that requires the right person doing it with you.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the nervous system piece, you can start that yourself right now.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Nervous system work isn't a supplement and it's not some mindset trick.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's specific physical signals that teach your body that the danger has passed.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Diaphragmatic breathing that activates the vagus nerve, cold water on the face, that flips a reflex that pulls you out of fight or flight.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: These work because you do them over and over, not because they relax you for five minutes one time.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Done consistently, you can actually retrain the baseline that your body sits in.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Think of it like this: your gut protocol is a repair crew.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: They showed up, they brought the right tools, they know exactly what to do, but somebody locked the front door, so they can't get in the house.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Nervous system work is what unlocks that door.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not doing the repair crew's job for them, it's just letting them in to finally do it.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: The women I've worked with who struggled the longest were the ones whose nervous system had been on high alert the longest.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Once we added structured nervous system work alongside the actual protocol, stuff started shifting that the supplements alone never touched.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Same exact protocol works completely different in a body that finally feels safe.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: The vagus nerve is basically the main wire between your brain and your gut.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Fastest way to fire it up is a longer exhale than inhale.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: That longer exhale is the specific signal that flips you into the rest and digest, which is the mode your gut actually needs to do its job.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Tonight before bed, do this for four minutes.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe in through your nose for four counts, hold for two, breathe out through your mouth for six counts.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Exhale always longer than the inhale.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Four minutes of that.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Then for the next 48 hours, just notice your morning urgency.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not whether it's gone, but whether it's different.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is it calmer, even a little?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's your nervous system telling you that it's listening.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your test might have been incomplete.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: The person reading it might have missed something.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The support might have run out when you need it at most.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or your nervous system might never have been part of the plan at all.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean give up on functional medicine.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: It means you need someone who has been there and knows what to do.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you had probiotics as part of your treatment plan and those haven't helped, watch this video that will explain why.